The impeachment question is really two questions.

I've been wanting to post a clarification—or, if you prefer, a correction—of my most recent post ("Q: How do you respond to a national emergency? A: Impeach the man who created it.").  A recent reply to that post has further prodded me to attempt that clarification.  So here goes.

In the original post, I certainly sounded like I was beating the drums for impeachment: "Do it!  Do it now!."  This doesn't make clear what question I was trying to answer.

A vague, generic formulation of the question would be something like: "Should we impeach (and remove) President Donald Trump?"  But here are two more precisely formulated questions:

• Given what we know so far, would impeaching (and removing) Trump be justified?
  
  
• Given what we know so far, would impeaching (and removing) Trump be advisable?

And my main point, today, is that these are two different questions, to which an individual might reasonably give different answers.  And when we talk about impeachment, we might understand each other better by making clear (as I did not), in any opinion we state, which question we are answering.

So what are my own answers to these two different questions?

To the question of whether removing Trump is justifiable, I answer "yes."  This is the question I was really focused on answering; in particular, whether removal is justified by his blatantly unconstitutional "declaration of emergency," even without considering his various other transgressions.

And behind that opinion, by the way, is a more general opinion, which I didn't even state explicitly: that an "impeachable offense" (an action which justifies impeachment and removal) need not be a crime: need not be something to which the law attaches a criminal penalty.  An attempt by the president to exceed his powers by doing something obviously unconstitutional is also an impeachable offense.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, other things being equal, a blatantly unconstitutional power grab, like this "emergency" declaration, is, other things being equal, more clearly an impeachable offense than is committing a crime, as such.  Abuse of power is, fundamentally, what the impeachment provision in the Constitution is for.

So I am doubling down on my original position, as clarified.  I strongly believe that, given the emergency declaration and its context, impeaching Trump and removing him from office would be justified.

But do I believe that it would be advisable?  My answer to that one is, in fact, different, at least in degree of conviction.  I lean toward believing it to be advisable, but I am far less certain of that.  I don't want to be a crusader for it, at least not at this time.  As I said in my reply to the anonymous comment, I think it may be just as well that that decision is not mine to make.